Fox News revealed the latest, sordid chapter of this history that did not come from Nazi Germany or the 1930s Jim Crow south. Instead, the medical experiment occurred in San Francisco, California, during the 1960s and 1970s.
The University of California at San Francisco Medical School selected prison inmates, placed herbicides and pesticides on their skin, and injected them into their veins. The Medical School conducted the experiments at a prison hospital called the California Medical Facility at Vacaville, 50 miles from San Francisco. The test subjects were 2600 men incarcerated during the 1960s and 1970s.
Two medical doctors, Dr. Howard Maibach and Dr. William Epstein, conducted the experiments. Epstein died in 2006 and, according to the AP, did not express an opinion about the moral implications of the experiments. Maibach still works at the University and has expressed remorse.
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“What I believed to be ethical as a matter of course forty or fifty years ago is not considered ethical today. I do not recall in any way in which the studies caused medical harm to the participants.”
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The University’s Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost, Dan Lowenstein, also issued a statement. “UCSF apologizes for its explicit role in the harm caused to the subjects, their families and our community by facilitating this research, and acknowledges the institution’s implicit role in perpetuating unethical treatment of vulnerable and underserved populations — regardless of the legal or perceptual standards of the time.”
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The statement also acknowledged that the University engaged in “questionable” informed consent practices. The University paid the inmate test subjects $30 a month for their participation in the experiments.
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Part of the experiments involved placing small cages of mosquitos on the inmates’ skin or near their arms to determine whether humans attracted the harmful pests. The University halted the experiments in 1977. That year, California ended the use of prisoners in medical experiments. The year before, the Federal government had prohibited similar experiments in the federal prison system.
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The University noted that no evidence exists that the experiments had explicitly been directed toward African American men. Nevertheless, Maibach at one time believed in racial differences in biology. The report issued by the USSF also stated that Maibach has “come to the understanding that race has always been a social and not a biological construct, something not appreciated by so many of us in a prior era.”
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